"RuneScape is a massively multiplayer online role-playing
game by British developer JagexLimited, programmed in Java. With nearly nine million active free players and 800,000
members.RuneScape is one of the top online games in the world.

RuneScape and released to the public as a
beta version on 4 January 2001. This version is still online today and is currently titled RuneScape Classic.
On 12 January 2006, play was restricted to paying members who had logged in at least once between that date and 5 August 2005.
This meant that no other accounts that did not meet this expectation would ever be allowed the use of RuneScape Classic.

As technological advances kept coming over the years, Jagex began to make massive changes
to RuneScape. Although this revision was originally planned to be a graphical update, Jagex instead worked to completely
rewrite the game engine. They introduced a version that consisted entirely of three-dimensional graphics, with other significant
improvements. While in development, this version was named RuneScape 2. The name was later changed to RuneScape,
but the name RuneScape 2 is still used to differentiate between it and RuneScape Classic. An incomplete beta
of this version was made available to paying members on 1 December 2003, and the finished version was launched on 29 March
2004."- Wikipedia

News-

2nd Aug 2005 - RuneScape Classic is no longer available to free users

We had planned on keeping RS-Classic around as a fun little nostalgia trip for people who wanted to see what the game was
once like. However that idea is currently being spoiled by some irresponsible players who just see it as good place to cause
trouble. We're not happy with this, so we are taking steps to clean it up so our loyal players can enjoy it properly. This
is the first step in achieving that. You won't see it improve massively overnight, but this makes it much easier for us to
kick out the troublemakers and make sure they actually stay out, rather than coming back. So in the long run there should
be a big improvement.

If you wish to play for free we recommend you play our main RuneScape game instead. We would like to reassure our users
that we have absolutely NO intention whatsoever of removing the free version of our main game.

The main version of RuneScape was designed from the ground up to have far better monitoring and protection systems. It
is regularly updated anyway, and also being our main game means there is a bigger team looking after it. All this means it's
possible for us to run and police a free version of the main RuneScape far more easily and affordably. So we've decided it
makes most sense to make that our main free offering. You can expect the free version of the main game to continue to be available
for years to come.